Cheese by any other name would smell as strong!

[muckefuck]

The last two Chinese classes have been really great. We finally seem to be hitting our stride with the new textbook, which is a massive improvement over the one we were using before. For one thing, it's aimed at grownups rather than kids; for another, it actually includes explanations of some of the syntactic patterns and drills for practicing them. Plus, Liu laoshi is forcing us to talk more. Last night, Xiao Fei told me that the grammar is beginning to fall into place for him and Mozhu says she's finally beginning to parse the Chinese spoken in class. I still have trouble with this myself. Listening comprehension has always been my worst linguistic skill, even poorer than my oral production.

Our assignment was to explain how to cook a dish so I got monshu to type up the recipe for master sauce and presented it as hong2shao3rou4 ("red-cooked meat"). After I finished, my teacher said, "Very good, but that's not hongshaorou." "What is it?" I asked, but she couldn't tell me. Xiao Fei wasn't prepared and had to describe the preparation of chicken cordon bleu off the cuff. He was going along pretty well until he had to ask how to say "cheese". Teacher misunderstood him and thought he was trying to produce a Chinese word until I looked up ru3lao4 in my Little Red Book.

She pronounced this ru3luo4, which confused the heck out of me. Looking in my bigger, Taiwanese dictionary, I see that luo4 is the "reading pronunciation" of 酪. This isn't the first time we've encountered one in her speech, so either these are more current in Taiwan or she's just that old-fashioned. Fortunately, the whole matter is moot, because modern Chinese speakers don't say ru3luo4 or ru3lao4--they say qi4si1.

Comments

[foodpoisoningsf.livejournal.com]

I assume you mean Mandarin?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Where exactly? Using "Standard Chinese" or just "Chinese" for guo2yu3/pu3tong1hua4 is pretty common practice these days, with "Mandarin" reserved for the Mandarin dialect group (bei3fang1 fang1yan2).

Ah, I guess calling my Far Eastern Chinese-English Dictionary a "Taiwanese dictionary" is pretty ambiguous. What I mean is a dictionary of Standard Chinese published in Taiwan, not a Taiwanese dialect dictionary.

Tutto chiaro?